Three Dishese With Dana Herbert| Recipes Articles

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Bear in mind that you should conduct yourself in life as at a feast.

- Epictetus

Three Dishese With Dana Herbert

This column invites you on an adventure to great restaurants around the world to meet the amazing chefs, mixologists, restaurateurs and sommeliers behind them and the foods that inspired their work today. This week, we sit down with Chef Dana Herbert of Desserts by Dana to find out which dishes shaped his cooking style and outlook today.

Chef Dana Herbert, the CEO of Desserts By Dana lives and breathes in the sweet and artistic world of pastry art, where flavors and colors take on a life of their own on towering wedding cakes of many shapes, breathtaking sugar sculptures, and custom edible creations for all occasions.

Dana’s cool and calm demeanor and myriad of culinary talents have earned him a number of nicknames including “The Sugar Daddy” for his expertise as a sugar artist using pulled and blown sugar. In addition, Dana is known in his locale for his cake artistry as “Delaware’s King of Cakes.”

Sugar sculptures can be more delicate than single-pane glass, so it takes years to master the complicated relationship between sugar and temperature. An average showpiece takes eight painstaking hours to complete. Chef Herbert has clearly honed his skill through time and effort to create his wonderful pieces.

Chef Herbert has been on numerous television baking competitions. In his last competition, Dana was awarded a $50,000 cash prize and an apprenticeship with TV’s Cake Boss, Buddy Valastro when he won Cake Boss: The Next Great Baker, in its’ premier season on TLC.

Dana Herbert, Chef/Owner

What is the dish that:

1. Inspired your love of food?

That’s a tough one! What stood out was when I had this pork tenderloin at Vita Nova in Delaware...it was awesome. It had cracked coriander and a rice pilaf. The chef was packing in so much flavor and different textures, and I fell in love with food.

2. Is your signature?

I have a few. One of them is a Southern lemon cake with cream cheese Icing and strawberries. A second is sweet potato cheesecake with candied carrots and fresh blackberries with a blackberry coulis. And I do a red velvet with bacon. That was an accident. I was working on cakes and someone brought me breakfast. I accidentally put some cake in my mouth with some of the bacon and I thought to myself, that was pretty darn good.

3. You cook on your night off?

If I had my choice, it would be a pasta dish. Normally penne or tagliatelle with a pink sauce made with garlic, shallot, shrimp, scallops and chicken.